From the heart of besieged and liberated Gaza, Hamas’ Politburo’s head Ismail Haniyeh has sounded the call to launch an intifada in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to Judaize Jerusalem, thereby endorsing the Israeli narrative that claims that the city is the political and religious capital of world Jewry.

Meanwhile, the head of Palestinian ‘legitimacy’ Mahmoud ‘Abbas emerges to address us with a shameful and feeble speech, in which his response to this insult is summarized in a decision to join more international bodies and continue consultations with ‘the [Arab] brothers’ before taking any further action. It is as if he were the president of Micronesia, not of the PLO.

Under Trump, the U.S. wanted to be the first country in the world to recognize occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and it got what it wanted. But neither it nor its racist president realize that they have administered the ‘the shock’ that the Arab and Islamic nations needed to emerge from their coma and the state of humiliation and disgrace they are living in.

Trump is moving his embassy from occupied Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem. He has delivered the coup de grace, not only to the head of fake peace process, but to the heads of his allied Arab rulers, especially in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. For according to Israel’s Channel 10 TV, they supported his step before it was taken and declared, which explains their delayed and feeble reaction to it.

Trump does not want allies, but servants and lackeys with whom he deals condescendingly and arrogantly. After milking 550 billion dollars worth of deals during his first meeting in Riyadh (of which 460 billion were from Saudi Arabia alone and the rest were arms’ deals with Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain), he is now rewarding them and doing them a favor in return by slapping them in the face with his decision to Judaize occupied Jerusalem.

We cannot rely on the UN Security Council meeting that will be held today to debate this American insult. What we are relying on is that the mosques where 56 Arab and Islamic states conduct Friday prayers will turn into arenas of anger and slogans hostile to the U.S. and Israel, demanding revenge.

Some defeatist voices are promoting defeatism and advocating normalized relations with Israel, viewing it as a trusted ally since it has never killed a single Saudi or Gulf Arab. They see Israel as a friend and ally, insulting the Palestinians and accusing them of having sold their lands [to the Jews before 1948]. To these voices that are spreading the culture of surrender and submission and casting doubt on the value of these angry demonstrations, just as they cast doubt on the effectiveness of intifadas, and to those behind them, we say: These waves of anger detonated the first ‘stones’ intifada and the second armed intifada, and mobilized for the defeat of three Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip in less than three years. These are the waves that humiliated and shamed the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, forcing it to withdraw unilaterally in defeat in 2000, and rubbed its nose in mud in the 33-day war in Lebanon in July 2006.

Trump could not have committed this sin or folly had Iraq been strong, had Syria not been confronting the conspiracy project throughout the past seven years, had Libya not been in the midst of anarchy and fragmentation, had pioneering Egypt not been begging for its loaf of bread, had Algeria not been tending to the wounds of its black decade of terrorism, and had Yemen not been confronting an unjust aggression.

The U.S. project of destroying the main Arab states under the banner of democracy and human rights, and of consolidating Israel as the leading regional superpower has brought us to this humiliation. The latest slap in the face was Trump’s decision, which is a prelude to the major surrender deal, the establishment of the Palestinian state in Sinai, crowning Netanyahu as the ‘new’ Arab League’s secretary-general.

Trump has shed all masks and displayed his ugly face to his Arab allies. He has lit the fuse of a religious war whose fodder will be his country and its Israeli ally. For the era when oil and its returns dominated the official Arab decision, is breathing its last.

We have always wagered on the Arab and Islamic peoples, never on their regimes. And we have great confidence in these nations and have never been deceived by some fake or misleading manifestations here or there. When our brothers in the Gulf confront the attempts at normalization and those promoting them with courage and daring, this only confirms that our wager was not misplaced, and that these nations across the entire length and breadth of the Islamic world will not let their Jerusalem, their Aqsa, and their Church of Holy Sepulcher, down.

I can assure you that the steadfast people in Palestine will not disappoint you. They are just as we have always known them. Are they not the same people who entrenched themselves in the Aqsa Mosque’s squares, carrying the shrouds of martyrdom in their hands, and forcing Netanyahu to remove his electronic gates and flee? Are they not the people who forced Sharon to flee from the Gaza Strip leaving his settlements behind? Are they not the people who have offered caravans of martyrs in defense of the nation’s dignity, honor, and creed over a hundred years of jihad and struggle?

I also assure you that the Arab peoples – and not their rulers and governments – are is sound health, and that their ‘real’ revolutions of anger will sweep away all the rot that has accumulated on the nation’s body over the past seven lean years. They will take up their positions in the resistance’s trench, adopting its culture and upholding its slogans.

Trump’s declaration was a golden opportunity for President ‘Abbas and his PA to purge themselves from the sins of Oslo and the dishonorable security coordination, as well as 23 years of shameful negotiations. But he did not do so. He insists on drawing a tragic end line for himself. It is painful to see those around him avoiding taking up this historic moment and embellishing these defeatist positions on his behalf.

But we thank Trump – even though he does not deserve any gratitude – for unintentionally lighting the fuse of an Arab and Islamic awakening. This awakening will rearrange the region’s conditions but on new bases whose main title is that of resistance. For he has provided the most powerful ammunition to extremism and hardline positions at the expense of his allies who hide behind the banner of ‘moderation.’

Trump and his Arab allies will lament the days of ISIS and al-Qa’ida. His stark and blunt bias in favor of racist Israeli aggression will pave the way for the emergence of more dangerous and stronger organizations that will make use of this opportunity that he has created for seeking revenge.

Jerusalem – and not Abu Dis – will remain the capital of Palestine, the whole of Palestine. And just as the freedom fighters in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Algeria alerted the colonialist reality imposed on them by force, the Palestinians will march with the support of their Arab and Muslim brethren down the same path and achieve victory.